


a curse is never broken

by dabblingDilettante



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Multiple Selves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 08:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9538898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dabblingDilettante/pseuds/dabblingDilettante
Summary: There are reasons Lucretia does not look into mirrors.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Icie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/pseuds/Icie) in the [selfcestfest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/selfcestfest) collection. 



The smoke never fades, where Phandalin once stood. It's like fog from above. Black glass stands befit by a silvered ring. Staring at it. Lucretia knows it cannot be a mirror. She does not look into them if she can help it, but her eyes always catch upon the spot, as cameras and telescopes appraise the planet's surface.

She does not return till reports of ghosts.

Shadows, and phantoms, and doppelgangers, rising as though from ink. The Voidfish stops people from questioning imprints of glass, circles like massive hammers were dropped by giants and gods, but the travel routes do not change so easily. In the mouths of merchants come rumors and monsters, and in her ears, lies a different answer.

"So, business or pleasure?"

Avi hangs over her transport, giving a wide scaly grin, until Lucretia's dry stare puts him back to work.

"S-sorry, Director," he says, "I'll prepare the coordinates."

The bulb closes, hydraulics below spinning her to face forward. It's been too long. Artificial gravity, no matter how magical, does aging bones no good. She presses a hand over her collar, and lets her shoulders roll loose. Avi stands below, nearly out of sight, beyond strict posture. He can't see her smile.

"A woman is allowed both, on occasion," she answers.

It's for nothing, to no one, and she is hurtling through space before the words make their way free. Avi didn't give her the usual talk, the explanation that is his job, because - it's her. Lucretia runs through memos in her head, and finds the lever she has to pull, calm to the unsure seconds prior.

The orb does not land square center to the aftermath. It slides along like stones skipping water, every jolt knocking her senses out of her head. Worse than the speeding base, she could almost slam into the walls, unsure to how far off-target she had gone. Time pauses in a breath. She has her staff in hand. All it takes is a spell.

The first word, waiting for the force of gravity to make her bite her tongue, makes her stop. Time didn't pause. The walls around her spin, but the window rolls clear, to ice. Sculpted ice, trickling up the side, and through the small gap of an exit.

Outside is a mirror.

In that reflection, she finds a hand - the world falling out from under her, Lucretia takes it. The glass below is warm. When she crumples against it, there is the question of fire and magma deep below.

"...What happened?"

She is certain that was in her head.  It would have to be, for the cadence.  The voice.

"Has it been so long ..."

There is no elegance in how she sits up. Her subordinates are not here to see. There is no one here to judge her but -

A young face. Not that young - the days Lucretia had taken insult at people assuming her younger than she was, twenties instead of strong thirties, were not long behind her. She let her hair grow more, though. She'd forgotten that, outside a distorted reflection.

"Are you ... me?"

Her eyes bother Lucretia the most.

"I understood the Bell was powerful, but I never expected it could draw anyone through time."

They burn with more than unbidden pride.

"What caused this destruction?"

Lucretia stands tall, before herself. A breath shorter than she once was. "You are standing on the remains of Phandalin." The staff in her hands is the only true mirror. "A dwarf managed to find the Phoenixfire Gauntlet before my subordinates could stop him. This is all that's left."

She paces the dark surface, ripples of smoke around every step. "How could we have let this happen."

"You have the Bell?" Lucretia's mouth is dry.

It makes her stop. "Of course."

"You won the chess game," Lucretia whispers.

When she left, rushing to Wonderland, Lucretia had not considered being overwhelmed by the thrall. It was an achievement to know she could find a relic, alone. No matter how much it knew her. Stealing the time she had planned to minutes.

Her reflection is slow to speak. Her trio had spoken of those too far gone. The woman taken by the Gaia Sash, and how they tried to pull her from the thorns of magic. Lucretia has seen it before, but it is strange on herself. Glass could melt beneath her boots. She is powerful. Bright. Full of contempt.

"...And you lost."

Lucretia's mouth flattens, thin, jaw tight.

"You lost," the reflection repeats. "Didn't you?"

"My goal is more important than throwing away my life for the promise of nothing," Lucretia responds.

"And yet."

The Animus Bell is not ostentatious. Almost quaint. But the sound it makes, with a single bell, makes the mirror below her quaver and shift.

The reflection says, "You are not my future."

"No," Lucretia agrees.

"So you allowed this to happen, to this city, after losing a game," she says.

She didn't have a clue of what Lucretia had gone through. What she had built, over years, in a body that would never be hers again. She should have been far beyond the pulse of anger behind her eyes, in experience and aching bones.

"What have you been doing, all this time?" the reflection asks.

Lucretia has built and fought and lost and won and brought fools into her ranks, and kind children, and robots and orcs and everything in-between.

She is interrupted in the same breath she moves to speak.

"I already know. The Bell is quite helpful."

"It is not to be used flagrantly," Lucretia spits.

"You let three bumbling fools trip their way into the organization you built from the ground, and have simply watched them gather what you were too weak to touch."

"There is a thrall," Lucretia says. "It is the best option we have."

"When was the last time you left your base?" her reflection asks.

Planet-side gravity is no kindness.

"You hid there. Even as Maureen died, you never came down to see her. Even as she hid the Philosopher's Stone from your sight. Was that the best option?"

Wonderland is not something someone can escape alive.

Lucretia had run as far as she could.

And they'd caught her again.

"Do you know of the Void Fish," she says.

"Of course," says the ghost.

"I found it. Perhaps the Bell told you as well, but it works in very particular ways." Lucretia goes on before she can be cut off. "I feed it information, and it cannot be processed by any who have not had the serum."

"We feed it information about the artifacts, the Bureau, the catastrophe. I know. I'm no fool."

"There is an exception to that," Lucretia says.

Ice is useful in many ways. To freeze feet to the ground. Send icicles shooting into people's veins. To leave their fingers frozen and wrong before they can twitch. No matter how hot the threat of black glass below, even a spell half as strong would do irreparable damage.

Her shadow should scream.

Lucretia cracks the base of her staff against the ground, and her hands crackle. It is her fingers that snap first. With them falls the bell, and they both watch, as they both shatter against the ground in a shower of red and gold.

"The Void Fish has no effect upon the dead," Lucretia says.

"I am not -"

She doesn't finish before the ice overtakes her throat. The spell takes her from inside out. Icicles sprout from her chest, blooming through her warm brown skin. Frost is an afterthought. Her eyes shrink, lashes sparkling with soft crystalline patterns. It is nothing like Maureen's overwhelming pink. Flakes make their way out her mouth, in last desperate breaths. But the end is quiet. Soon, she is melting.

Lucretia does not stay to watch.

There are reasons she does not look into mirrors.

 


End file.
